


too much to ask.

by katarama



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant Gansey Death, Character Study, F/M, Jealousy, Kissing, M/M, Multi, Pining, There are a lot of side ships in this but the core of this is very unrequited Gansey/Ronan, Unrequited Love, Very brief alcohol and pill references in the context of K
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:08:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27089902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katarama/pseuds/katarama
Summary: Love is too small of a word for what Ronan feels for Gansey.  Best friends, brothers, is what he says out loud, but it pales in comparison to what he feels.Most words are too small for Gansey.
Relationships: Henry Cheng/Richard Gansey III, Henry Cheng/Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 8
Kudos: 41





	too much to ask.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Verbyna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/gifts).



> Happy Birthday, Lee! This prompt started in my head from a prompt Theo gave me thirty years ago, but shifted dramatically because of a conversation Lee and I had months and months ago about how fics so often don’t talk about when polyamory isn’t something someone is capable of. I’m less sorry than I should be.

Ronan remembers Gansey moving into town. 

Ronan remembers the first time he saw Gansey, remembers taking in the orange Camaro before he took in the boy behind the wheel. Ronan did not understand the person of Richard Campbell Gansey, III, did not understand the khakis and polo shirts and the boat shoes and the words that were both carefully placed and naturally pretentious.

The Camaro, though. That Ronan understood. Gansey, _just Gansey, thanks_ , Ronan understood. Ronan understood staring at a for sale sign in front of an abandoned factory, Gansey’s voice warm as he said it was perfect. Perfect for _us_ , inclusive of Ronan. Ronan understood Gansey calling his cell at 3:14 AM, Ronan letting it go to voicemail three times before he finally picked up to hear Gansey’s voice, wild and frantic, plowing on without a hello to tell Ronan about something he found on a trip to the hills.

Months later, Ronan’s dad dies, and Ronan moves into Monmouth. If the Barns isn’t an option, Gansey is the only option Ronan doesn’t hate.

Everyone sees Gansey as Ronan’s keeper. They aren’t wrong. When Ronan goes missing for two days after he moves into Monmouth, off on a bender with K, his first bender with K, Gansey is the one whose call he finally picks up. When Ronan skips too many days of school in a row, Gansey is the only one who can sometimes get his ass in a desk. Gansey is his roots, the only thing holding his feet on the ground. Ronan feels like a knife these days, and Gansey and Matthew are the only things keeping Ronan from slashing himself to pieces.

The people who think Ronan is the only one being kept don’t know shit about Gansey, though.

Ronan heard stories, from Gansey, about what he was like before Henrietta. A fourteen-year-old boy jetting off to Wales, freshly resurrected, driven by obsession. Picking himself up and going when he needed to, without saying goodbye, without leaving a trace. If Ronan was running away from his demons, and Gansey was running straight towards them, single-minded and manic, not caring who he left behind.

If they are both honest (and Ronan doesn’t lie), Ronan is as much of an anchor for Gansey as Gansey is for Ronan.

Ronan has heard people talk about them. Especially after his dad died. Especially after Ronan started wearing his sharpness on the outside, picked up drag racing and drinking with the worst Henrietta had to offer. 

People ask why a Gansey, handsome and charming and destined for greatness, would bother with a snake like Ronan.

Ronan doesn’t bother with answering, because it always made sense to him. Ronan is blunt honesty, no politics. Ronan understands staying up all night because nothing can make the buzzing in his brain stop, the fear of going to sleep and not waking up, or waking up to a world of nightmare things. Ronan understands following the impulse to drive to the grocery store for orange juice neither of them needs because it is somewhere to go, because nothing can chase away the restless itching under his skin, but this at least comes close.

Gansey is what people think he is, too, well-bred and regal and educated and charming. But the people who think that is all he is don’t know Gansey.

Ronan sees the raw Gansey, Gansey without the edges sanded down. Ronan hears the buzz of the razor as Gansey’s hands tug at his curls, Ronan’s head bowed and his neck exposed, relief filling his chest as his hair falls to the floor in chunks. Ronan sees Gansey in a soft t-shirt and boxers, bags under his red eyes and hair dripping wet. Ronan feels Gansey cling to him, fists clenched in his shirt after nightmares plagued with bees swarming closer and closer, the echo of a voice telling him he failed, that he didn’t wake Glendower and Glendower couldn’t save him twice. Ronan has Gansey in his most unfiltered form, because Gansey lets him, because Gansey chooses him. Because it is the two of them, Ronan and Gansey against the world.

Love is too small of a word for what Ronan feels for Gansey. Best friends, brothers, is what he says out loud, but it pales in comparison to what he feels.

Most words are too small for Gansey.

* * *

Adam is not Gansey.

Adam is easier and harder for Ronan to understand. Adam knows how to take a hit. Adam knows cars. Adam knows a hard day’s work. Adam knows how to keep his shit to himself, knows how to push back without folding. Adam knows how to hold his own under pressure from Gansey, something Ronan can’t do half the time. Adam looks Ronan in the eye and says he’s fine, even though they both know that Adam is barely surviving. Ronan should hate the lies. They slide from Adam’s mouth easily. Instead, it makes Ronan want to dig until he hits the truth.

There is not wildness in Adam. There is something different, something other about Adam, but Adam is not wild in the way Gansey is, the way Ronan is. Adam is solid rock, is stubbornness and force of will pressed into the shape of a person. 

Adam is infuriating from the first day Ronan meets him, an itch under Ronan’s skin that he can’t help but scratch. Gansey is obsessed with him, even though Adam and Gansey are opposites, always stomping on each other’s feet.

Ronan hates that Gansey wants Adam around all the time. Ronan hates even more that he does, too.

Adam refuses to let anyone help him with anything. Adam is so much better than every other fucking person at Aglionby (except for Gansey, except for Matthew), and there are only pieces of moments when he realizes that. Then there are all the other moments, the moments when he takes hit after hit and doesn’t do anything, when he looks at the bruises on his body like that’s where they belong. 

Ronan always notices. Ronan gives up trying to talk to him about it. Gansey doesn’t give up, but that’s how Gansey is. It’s how he’s always been with Ronan, and it works for them, but Ronan isn’t Adam. It’s Gansey’s mistake to repeat.

Ronan dreams hand cream for Adam. It smells like Cabeswater, and Ronan plans to give it to him, but he doesn’t have the nerve. Adam has long fingers, rough hands. Skilled hands. Ronan can’t stop staring at them. It’s easier, sometimes, than staring at Adam’s face, tracing the lines of Adam’s cheekbones and facing down the steady blue of Adam’s eyes. It makes Ronan want to break something when the bruises appear. 

Adam’s face makes Ronan want to break something on a good day, but he knows that is something else, something that he won't put words to until it’s pried out of him.

(K tries. He sticks his thumbs in and he digs, scrabbles at Ronan with jagged nails. He is just trying the wrong door, the one that is locked instead of jammed. Ronan isn’t ashamed of the way he has rebuilt his life around trying to keep Gansey happy. Calling him Gansey’s dog is a fact, not an insult. It’s true no matter what he and Gansey are to each other. 

Gansey’s voice goes firm, sometimes, when Ronan comes back from spending time with K. But there’s no follow through. Ronan sometimes thinks (hopes, desperately, in a way that makes his blood hot) that this will be the day that something happens. That this will be the day Gansey puts his foot down. 

He eventually realizes that if Gansey hasn’t done anything yet, he isn’t going to. Adam still looks at Ronan like a puzzle he’s trying to solve. 

K asks him, in the movie theater, while Gansey is off in DC with Adam, the same question everyone else wonders. _You think Three Dicks is gonna stick around when he finally sees what you are when you aren’t hiding from yourself?_

 _Look at his Camaro_ is all Ronan says in response. The Camaro killed by a dream thing, the Camaro Ronan is trying desperately to dream back just the way it was. It told Ronan everything he needed to know about Gansey. That Gansey could love a broken thing. That Gansey could love a bright and wild and unruly thing he didn’t understand, that never did what he wanted.

K doesn’t get it, but he does kiss Ronan. As if to say, _fuck Gansey, I know what you are_. It’s hard and fast, K stealing kisses like he steals from dreams. Ronan likes it. He doesn’t want to, but it is rough and good all at once, confirmation he needed from someone too dangerous to ask for it. 

In his memory, it will melt into the haze of that weekend. Adam and Gansey out of town. Pills and booze and Ronan’s heart racing in his chest as he tries to keep up with Kavinsky, an impossible task he knows leads to an early grave. K kissing Ronan like drowning. Ronan kissing back, slowing things down until it feels more like a kiss than urgent desire, or ownership.

He owns up to wrecking the Pig, but he has a perfect copy to replace it. He also has a ring of hickeys he wears under his shirt collar, and bruises on his hips, but Gansey doesn’t need to know that. 

When K goes up in flames, the secret goes with him.)

* * *

Ronan hates Blue Sargent.

His world had settled. Things had expanded from Ronan and Gansey to include an Adam. Ronan had made his peace with that. Ronan started to understand that having Gansey meant sharing Gansey. Ronan had two brothers. In theory, Ronan thought he could share, when he had to.

Blue, though. Ronan hates her in a way that surprises him. He hates her from the first moment when Adam peers at her from the booth at Nino’s, when Ronan makes a crack about it and Adam reacts and Gansey decides that this is something Adam will let him do, play wingman. Ronan hates her when Gansey drags them all over to see her family. He doesn’t get the way Adam stares at her, moony-eyed.

It isn’t how Adam looks at Ronan, at all.

The year Blue comes around, everything changes. He starts to hate her less, actually starts to begrudgingly respect her (to like her, though he’d never admit that out loud).

But then he sees Adam holding her hand, or using food money to get her flowers, and he is back to square one. 

“You know that you two are very much alike,” Gansey comments one day during the summer after Adam’s sacrifice. He says it like a stern parent, like it should clear everything up, like if Ronan can only see the ways they are alike, the fucking skies will part and Ronan will become her best friend forever.

Ronan knows he’s right, but he can’t explain out loud why that makes it even worse. Not yet, and definitely not to Gansey.

(It rings in his head later, when Adam and Blue are long over, when he notices Gansey looking at Blue differently. It makes him wonder what the difference was, for Gansey.

There must have been one, because for once, Gansey fucking does something.)

* * *

Ronan kisses Adam.

They are in the Barns. Adam looks small, and Ronan wants to break something. He knows he can’t, knows that it would make things worse, when Adam looks like that. But he can’t do nothing. He gets so tired of looking and doing nothing. Ronan is not Gansey. Ronan can’t just do nothing, can’t just sit and sit and sit in his feelings, never going anywhere. He has been doing it for too long, as it is, and he fucking hates it, feeling like he has a secret eating up more and more of his insides.

He kisses Adam, slow and sure, and Adam kisses back, and something dark and ugly leaves his body.

Adam doesn’t say anything. Ronan doesn’t either. He goes to the roof and he surrounds himself with light, and when he and Declan talk, no punches are thrown. Declan watches in awe, and Ronan shares the light with him.

Ronan decides to forgive himself, a little bit. He can work on starting to forgive Declan, too.

It takes a while for Adam to circle back around to it. Ronan is okay with that. He didn’t need an answer right away, and a lot is happening. He just needed Adam to know there was a question, and that Ronan was ready to ask it.

Adam says yes, in his own way. Ronan tells himself that it is everything he ever dreamed of, because he is allowed little lies, just to himself.

(Ronan is a dreamer. Gansey had asked Ronan to dream him the world, and Ronan had, Ronan would, in a heartbeat. 

Ronan has given up on Gansey wanting that from him, anymore.)

* * *

Gansey dies.

Gansey dies and everyone fucking knew it was coming except for him. Even Gansey seems so fucking accepting of it, because he heard his name in a churchyard, so of course he fucking knew. Ronan didn’t know. It’s the knife he was waiting for all along, except this time he isn’t wielding it, and this time it’s rusted, hacking at him over and over again, cutting him jagged and uneven.

It’s the only time in his life Ronan is glad Henry Cheng is around, because the rest of them are fucking useless.

When Gansey comes back, he is different. Ronan can see the places where certain things don’t match up just right, because Ronan has lived and breathed and stayed awake with Gansey for years, knows Gansey like the back of his hand.

This new Gansey says things the old Gansey wouldn’t. Gansey tells Ronan he loves Blue. Ronan knew that, but Gansey was too polite to say it, and it stings. Gansey tells Ronan he might like Henry, too, which stings worse. There had always been a part of Ronan that hoped that it was about what Ronan was, instead of who.

Gansey tells Ronan that he is going to travel with Blue and Henry, and he asks Ronan to come.

Ronan asks him if he wants Ronan to come along as some sort of sex referee, or some shit, because he doesn’t understand, otherwise, why Gansey would be inviting him along for this road trip from hell. Gansey has to know. Gansey can’t not know, after all this time, that he is asking the world of Ronan.

If Gansey had told Ronan he thought he loved Ronan, too, he might have fucking got Ronan. Ronan has always been bad at saying no to Gansey, when Gansey meant it, when it was important. Ronan would have put up with it, Blue and Gansey making heart eyes at each other and Henry staring at Gansey in the way Ronan saw set Gansey on fire.

Ronan had tried for so long to pull that out of Gansey, and Cheng did it like it was easy.

“I want you to come” isn’t the same as ‘I want you’, though. And at the end of the day, Ronan doesn’t think he is actually as good at sharing as he thought he was.

“I don’t want to leave the Barns,” was easier to say than ‘I have wanted you most for years, and all I want is for you to want me most, too’.

Gansey looks disappointed, and it twists at Ronan. The urge kicks up to appease him, to say ‘fine, I’ll fucking go on your fucking road trip, just don’t expect me to listen to Henry’s trash music’.

He doesn’t, though, and Gansey accepts it. Ronan feels like he just lost something, something other than having his Gansey there, keeping him in check, for what should be their last summer all together.

He gives Blue the Camaro without its insides. He makes a joke about it being green. He hopes no one thinks too carefully about what else it could mean.

* * *

Ronan has an Adam now. An Adam who wants Ronan enough to say yes, even though it ties him to Henrietta. An Adam who promises to come home when he can. Who uses home and does not mean Henrietta, but means the Barns, just like Ronan does. An Adam who shares things with Ronan quietly, whispers in Latin, words meant just for him.

Ronan knows that means that the other wanting should stop. It’s what he always criticized Declan for, and he hates to be a hypocrite.

“He always wanted you, too, you know,” comes from Blue one night, over the phone, careless with booze. Like she isn’t saying something that shouldn’t be spoken out loud, like she isn’t speaking Ronan’s secret into existence from where it’s been hiding, unacknowledged, all along.

“Yeah, well, it’s late now,” Ronan says.

The words sound bitter even to his own ears, but his words aren’t lies. He hates that he means it. He wishes he could be some other way, less selfish, less greedy. Less hung up by his own useless standards.

He can hear Gansey’s voice in the background, warm and too loud, can hear Henry laughing at whatever it is that Gansey said. Ronan can’t kill the urge to know what it is Gansey said, even if the words aren’t for him.

“Yeah,” Blue finally says, quietly. “I guess it is.”

Ronan can’t explain it, but the words feel so much worse coming from her.

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr at [sleepy-skittles](https://sleepy-skittles.tumblr.com/).


End file.
